Felicia's Journey

Evil and catastrophe have no explanation, Atom Egoyan demonstrated with searing
eloquence in his last film, The Sweet Hereafter -- which is why they can
be transcended. Nonetheless, he tries to come up with explanations in his
adaptation of William Trevor's schematic novel Felicia's Journey, and
his conclusions are much less satisfying. The title wanderer (Elaine Cassidy)
is a naive teenager from an intolerant small town in Ireland. Pregnant and
denounced by her father, she heads to an industrially blighted England in
search of her faithless lover. There she is assisted by Hilditch (a lubricious
Bob Hoskins), manager of dining services in a large plant, who offers to help
her. He has ulterior motives, of course, and the sly, wheedling duplicity with
which he insinuates Felicia into his tawdry, sadistic delusions makes for
fascinating if irritating viewing.

The problem with Felicia's Journey is not so much the nature of evil as
the failure of sympathy. Hoskins has never equaled the pathos or humor of his
performance in Mona Lisa, and those qualities are sadly lacking here;
Hilditch is just a creep, and delving into his past doesn't make him any more
appealing. And Cassidy's Felicia is an infuriatingly passive victim. Egoyan
does manage some of his wry reflexivity in scenes where Hilditch reverently
watches tapes of his mother's old BBC cooking show -- it's Psycho by way
of The French Chef. And some of The Sweet Hereafter's
quasi-mysticism surges toward the end as the journey takes an unexpected turn.
Otherwise, the terrain is familiar: a bus ride with no unscheduled stops.

-- Peter Keough

Last Night

Somehow, the end of the world seems downright comforting when the Fifth
Dimension play on the soundtrack. In Last Night, his debut as a feature
director, Don McKellar shows more the slyness of his screenplay for 32 Short
Films About Glenn Gould than the sentimentality of his script for The
Red Violin. The result is a dry, black comedy about annihilation that
seduces with its loopy insouciance and then overwhelms with its emotional
commitment.

The lives and imminent deaths of a handful of Torontonians intersect as the
world fumbles through its last six hours to the end, from inexplicable causes,
at midnight (a clue might be the fact that there no longer is any night). Chief
among these people is Patrick (McKellar, who could pass as Tom Hanks's forlorn
brother), for whom the world ended some time ago, when his beloved died. After
meeting with his family for "Christmas" (Sarah Polley is undistinguished in a
cameo as his sister), Patrick returns home for a quiet apocalypse alone, but
his solitude is disturbed by Sandra (Sandra Oh), a young woman whose agenda
includes a bottle of bad wine and a mystery briefcase.

What follows is expected but somehow utterly surprising. Despite some coy
whimsy at the beginning, McKellar makes the transition from droll irony to
poignant tragedy with blithe assurance. Perhaps most moving is the dorky piano
player whose desperate debut piano recital on doomsday seems a joke until he
actually plays in the minutes before midnight and brings tears to the
audience's eyes; similarly, Last Night starts with a giggle and ends
with a bang.